The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund projects which further the development of the FreeBSD operating system.

Monday, December 30, 2013

It's hard to believe that 2014 is just around the corner! We've raised around $660,000 so far as of 7PM Colorado Time December 30. We also have $75,000 in pledges that we should be receiving soon! We only have around 24 hours left to reach our goal of raising $1,000,000. Here is my plea to ask for your help. Please consider making a donation. It is so easy to do. Just click here to make a donation online or to find out where to mail a check. If you file US taxes, most likely your donation will be tax-deductible. If you send a check, please mail it tomorrow (December 31). For the donation to count towards 2013, the envelope has to be postmarked by December 31. Writing 2013 donation on your check doesn't work for our accounting.

This year has been amazing. Because of our successful fundraising campaign last year, we were able to support the FreeBSD Project and community in so many ways. You can read my appeal here to see where we spent the money this year.

There are three areas where we've grown the most. One is our FreeBSD development work. We now have two staff members working on FreeBSD projects, a full-time employee working on FreeBSD System Administration and Release Engineering work, and we have a Project Manager who is not only overseeing all of our funded projects, but also working on project roadmaps and helping facilitating collaboration between our corporate users and FreeBSD developers. This is helping to bring in more corporate sponsors too.

We've also increased our FreeBSD advocacy by producing professional FreeBSD marketing brochures, white papers, literature, and our new FreeBSD Journal that will be debuting in a few weeks!

Lastly, we've spent over $100,000 on hardware to improve the FreeBSD infrastructure. This equipment resides in our four co-location facilities at NYI, Sentex, Yahoo!, and ISC.

Our End-of-Year newsletter highlights everything we supported this last year. Take a few minutes to read up on why we need your donations and how we spend the money.

Thank you for your support!

Deb Goodkin
Secretary/Treasurer
The FreeBSD Foundation

P.S. Making a donation is quick and easy! Click here to make a donation now.

FACES OF FREEBSD

Each week we are sharing a story from someone involved in FreeBSD. This is our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. But, it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD world.

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Isabell's Story

My name
is Isabell Long, and I am a 19-year-old living in the south of England. I'm a Ruby
on Rails web developer at a social media startup named Gerraroom and a
volunteer staff member of the freenode IRC network. I love open data and—on the
non-tech side—good food, music (both playing and listening) and learning.
Before FreeBSD, I contributed documentation and support for Ubuntu, which was a
good introduction into the world of open source.

Friends
hinted that I should try FreeBSD by posting me burned CDs of releases. Then in
2011, I decided to participate in the Google Code-In contest, completing
documentation-related tasks and becoming heavily involved in the documentation
project afterwards. I became a documentation committer in April 2012. The new
committer mentoring process proved very useful and that, plus the accepting
community of FreeBSD, are reasons why I stay involved.

Thanks
to FreeBSD Foundation funding, I was able to attend my first overseas
conference at EuroBSDcon 2013 in Malta. Apart from the experience of going to a
country I’d never visited before, meeting people who I only knew on IRC and
seeing some people I met at the DevSummits in Cambridge was one of the best
bits. The documentation sessions were very useful and I completed a few tasks
on the website and Handbook during my time there and afterwards. I'm looking
forward to having a few similarly productive days in Bulgaria next year.

As a
thank you for providing resources to keep FreeBSD going and enabling committers
like me to travel to conferences, I donated a small amount in Malta to the
FreeBSD Foundation as I strongly believe that giving where possible keeps
positivity going and one day, that repays.

Isabell
Long

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of
the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and
easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Monday, December 23, 2013

FACES OF FREEBSD

Each week we are sharing a story from someone involved in FreeBSD. This is our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. But, it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD world.

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Kevin's Story

My name
is Kevin Martin, and I am the CEO and Founder of pair Networks, Inc. I've been
a computer person since I was very young. My father made a wise investment in
the very first Model 5150 of the IBM PC. He brought home the 64KB model with
two floppy disk drives in October 1981, and I immediately moved up from writing
games on the HP-41C, and in BASIC on notebook paper.

In
junior high and high school, I was "that kid" who helped fix computers,
whether in the school's library or main office. When I attended Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute (for Computer Science, naturally), there were SunOS 4.1
workstations available to students, and I jumped into BSD-flavored UNIX with
both feet. Soon I was an assistant at the Image Processing Lab, which had
the latest and greatest equipment on campus.

My
other passion is pinball. As a pre-teen I hung out in the arcade when my mother
went to her bowling league. In college I discovered pinball tournaments,
and started attending. Eventually I took over the Professional & Amateur
Pinball Association and started running the world's largest pinball
tournaments, twice yearly, just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More
recently, I founded Replay Foundation, a non-profit that promotes the
preservation, restoration, and enjoyment of pinball, with an emphasis on the
player experience.

In the
summer of 1995, I founded pair Networks, with an eye towards simple Web design
projects. I’d been running an FTP/Web site called "The Pinball
Archive" since early 1993, and was paying a series of obscure ISPs to host
it. While working on ideas for pair, I noticed that the latest ISP I was using,
Best Internet Communications, was migrating their servers from BSDI to FreeBSD.

Curious,
I borrowed a server from my uncle and installed FreeBSD 2.0.5. I was impressed
and immediately hooked. My experience with SunOS, combined with the power
of FreeBSD, made it possible to launch my own hosting company—which is what
pair Networks became. In January 1996, our T-1 to Digital Express came
online, and pair was launched with just a couple of Pentium servers, all
running FreeBSD 2.1. The Pinball Archive had found its permanent home.

Over
the past 18 years, FreeBSD has been an asset to our operations, and while we
have branched out a bit, we still primarily use FreeBSD and promote it whenever
possible. FreeBSD is a terrific technology with a terrific community.

Kevin Martin

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of
the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and
easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the successful completion of work on the improvement and integration of the Capsicum framework and the Casper services daemon. The Google Open Source Programs Office and the FreeBSD Foundation jointly sponsored Paweł Jakub Dawidek for this project.

Capsicum is a lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Capsicum extends the POSIX API, providing several new OS primitives to support object-capability security on UNIX-like operating systems. Capsicum is now a standard part of FreeBSD, and ports to other operating systems are in progress.

The Casper daemon provides an easy to use programming interface for services which are otherwise difficult or impossible to access in a capability sandbox, including DNS resolution, access to the password and system groups database, entropy, and sysctl system configuration nodes.

"Libcapsicum and the Casper daemon make it easier for application developers to take advantage of capability sandboxing -- a critical step in allowing not just web browsers, but also security-ciritical desktop applications such as mail readers and office suites, to mitigate security vulnerabilities," said Robert N. M. Watson, the FreeBSD Foundation board member and University of Cambridge lecturer who led the Google-funded Capsicum research project.

The new libnv library developed as part of this project simplifies inter-process communication, a critical aspect of the Capsicum sandboxing model. Redesigned capability rights allow for finer-grained control of individual capabilities by eliminating the previous limit on the number of different kinds of file-descriptor operations controlled by capabilities.

Capsicum API enhancements appear in FreeBSD 10.0 along with sandboxing of a number of base-system components; Casper will be available from FreeBSD 10.1 on, and will be used by a number of base system components including tcpdump and kdump.

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 9.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

FACES OF FREEBSD

Each week we are sharing a story from someone involved in FreeBSD. This is our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. But, it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD world.

Here’s a chance to get to know your fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD story.

Shteryana's Story

My name
is Shteryana Shopova. I am 31 years old and live in Sofia, the capital of a
small East European country called Bulgaria. I have a Bachelor’s degree in
Computer Science from the University of Sofia and am finishing a Master’s
degree in Computer and Network Security there. I was a guest lecturer at the
Network Security course at my Alma Mater this semester, which, along with
organizing EuroBSDCon 2014, is one of the biggest challenges I am facing in the
next several months.

Away
from computers, I enjoy the company of my family and friends, a glass of good wine,
and outdoor sports. I was on my school's
female basketball team for a few years, and I still enjoy playing the game (I’m
good at it). I learned to ski as a kid and I’m happy to be back on the ski
slopes in Europe after suffering a serious ankle injury a couple of years ago. I
am praying for lots of snow this winter.

My
first exposure to FreeBSD was in 2004 when I was working for a company
producing network devices. The OS that we developed and ran on the devices was
based on WindRiver's vxWorks, with a TCP/IP stack derived from the very early
ones from FreeBSD/NetBSD. I often found
myself looking at the projects' CVS repositories for solutions of problems that
I encountered at work. In 2005, I did the Google Summer of Code program for
FreeBSD, coding the client side of the SNMP protocol. Since all FreeBSD
development has to happen on FreeBSD-current, I installed FreeBSD on my laptop—alongside
the Windows and Slackware Linux I was running on it at the time. Several months
later I realized that apart from FreeBSD, I hadn't booted the other two operating
systems in months. So I wiped them out.

I try
to help the FreeBSD Project any way I can. I am maintaining the native SNMP
daemon and client code, doing bugfixes in networking related parts, testing the
OS a lot by following the HEAD (a.k.a FreeBSD-CURRENT), and trying out new
stuff that gets added there. The last couple of years I had to put off most of
the technical work I do for FreeBSD in favor of finishing my formal education.
Nevertheless, I continue to help by advocating for FreeBSD. I've given

FreeBSD-related
talks on several occasions, organized a BSD-dedicated track at OpenFest (the
largest local OpenSource conference), and proctored BSDCG certification exams (the
equivalent of LPIs for BSD system administrators). I am also on the board of
the EuroBSDCon Foundation in the role of the EuroBSDCon 2014 Organizing Committee
Chair.

Why
FreeBSD? I think it’s the only OS that so nicely fits all my needs. I
appreciate the modern and easy-to-administer filesystem—ZFS, plenty of
virtualization options including bhyve, the fast and modern networking stack,
plenty of third party software via the ports and packages, and more. I value
the extensive and good documentation, and the high quality and liberally
licensed source code (so I can experiment, make modifications, or fix problems
myself without having to wait for upstream patches, or even sell it without any
legal concerns). Finally, by interacting with the FreeBSD community and
developers—the entire BSD community in fact—I've learned so much and continue
to learn. I think it has shaped me as the professional I am today, and I am
very thankful for that.

I think
the FreeBSD Foundation is doing a great job of supporting the project. As a
developer, the most important activities of the Foundation are funding
developers to work on various projects, sponsoring FreeBSD-related technical
events, and giving travel grants to developers so that we have a chance to meet
physically and discuss ideas, projects, and problems. A couple of years ago I
added SNMPv3 authentication, encryption, and access control to bsnmpd(1), along
with a module for monitoring wireless interfaces. People had asked for those
additions for some time; I doubt I would have had the time and resources to
implement them if the Foundation hadn't sponsored me.

I want
to appeal to everyone: if you like FreeBSD, please consider a donation to the
FreeBSD Foundation, so we can make FreeBSD even better. And I hope to see you
at EuroBSDCon next year in Sofia!

Shteryana
Shopova

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of
the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and
easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

Fix to a regression in bsdinstall(8) that prevents ZFS on GELI installation from working correctly.

Please note: a last-minute problem was found in 10.0-RC1 testing with this installation option that is still being investigated. Please do not select the GELI encryption option from the installer. Although the installation successfully completes, the GELI passphrase will not decrypt the GELI provider.

Build Hyper-V kernel modules by default for i386.

Update oce(4) driver to support 40Gbps devices.

Improve robustness of the Xen balloon driver.

Fix accounting for hw.realmem on the i386 and amd64 platforms.

Fix poweroff(8) on XenServer.

Fix powerd/states on AMD cpus.

Add support for BCM57764, BCM57767, BCM57782, BCM57786 and BCM57787.

Fix PKG_ABI detection in bsdconfig(8) after pkg-1.2.

Fix emulated jail_v0 byte order.

Fix hang on reboot with active iSCSI connections.

Fix a potential system crash if a jail(8) is created and destroyed on systems with VIMAGE.

FACES OF FREEBSD

Each week we are sharing a story
from someone involved in FreeBSD. This is our Faces of FreeBSD series. It may
be a story from someone who’s received funding from us to work on development
projects, run conferences, travel to conferences, or advocate for FreeBSD. Or, it may be from someone who gives back to FreeBSD financially or in another way. But,
it is always from someone who is making a positive difference in the FreeBSD
world.

Here’s a chance to get to know your
fellow FreeBSD enthusiast. Sit back and enjoy another 2013 Faces of FreeBSD
story.

Brooks' Story

I’m a
Senior Software Engineer for SRI International, working on multiple clean slate
research projects using FreeBSD as
the operating system for research on the hardware-software interface. A FreeBSD committer since 2001 and core
team member from 2006 through 2012, I've built an HPC cluster based on FreeBSD, implemented an internal source
code sharing system with FreeBSD and
Trac, and most recently helped port FreeBSD
to an open source CPU to enable architecture, systems, and security research.
I've also helped drive our transition from a GNU toolchain to a more
modern LLVM based toolchain.

Outside
the world of computing I’m a foodie, gardener, home brewer of beer, mead and
cider, woodworker, and blacksmith.

My
first exposure to FreeBSD was a
floppy disk-based SLIP router installed in my high school in 1993/4 by a local FreeBSD-based ISP. Distracted as a Solaris admin during college,
I returned to FreeBSD almost
immediately after graduation when FreeBSD
made it trivial to set up a PPP router at home. The Aerospace Corporation,
my first post-college job, involved working with FreeBSD due to our extensive use of dummynet in our research labs.
Over the next decade-plus I spread FreeBSD
from the lab to the largest computing cluster at the company and to an internal
sourceforge.net-like system hosting over 350
projects.

Now I
work to make FreeBSD better, such as
working on toolchain and build system issues with a focus on medium to large
embedded systems. Our research group developed an open source CPU based on the 64-bit MIPS ISA that we use to explore the
hardware-software interface. I maintained Clang and LLVM ports, enhanced
the FreeBSD build and release system
to work without root permissions, and wrote and modified device drivers for our
platform. I also maintained a number of high performance computing related
ports including Sun Grid Engine and Ganglia as well as a number of Trac modules.

One of
the reasons I like FreeBSD is the
community involved in the process of building a principled, technically-advanced
operating system platform. Not only do we produce a great product, but we have
fun doing it.

I
appreciate how the FreeBSD Foundation
has helped me both directly and indirectly to attend conferences, developer’s
meetings, vendor summits, and events like Google Summer of Code mentors
summits. I’ve received travel grants for a number of these events and the
FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many BSD
conferences where I have presented, including AsiaBSDCon, BSDCan, EuroBSDCon,
and BSDDay Argentina.

Donating
to the FreeBSD Foundation is an easy
way to support FreeBSD. Even the
smallest donation helps as your mere presence as a donator demonstrates
community support. I'm excited by the early results of the FreeBSD Foundation’s recent expansion of staff and look forward to
continued growth. I donate every year.

Brooks Davis

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of
the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and
easy. To make a donation go to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/